1. Field of the Invention
This invention is in the field of faxing and electronic document management technology.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many business functions in modern life are based upon transactions in which an individual receives paper forms, often by fax or by downloading from the Internet, prints out the forms, fills in a few items, signs the form, and then either faxes the form somewhere else, or else scans the form and emails the form somewhere else.
For example, Doctor's offices are constantly inundated with insurance forms, patient forms, and prescription refill request forms. These forms are often handled by fax over telephone lines, and thus the physician's staff often spends a considerable amount of time shuffling paper from fax machines, to the doctor, and back to other fax machines as a result. In addition to expense and inefficiency, this paper shuffling can also lead to errors as individual papers can often become lost, mishandled, and/or faxed to the wrong destination.
In the same way, contracts and government forms, for example tax forms, are also constantly being received, first in electronic form as email attachments, scans, faxes, downloads and the like. They are then briefly converted to paper for the purposes of the signature, and then converted back to electronic form for subsequent emailing as attachments, faxes, uploads, and the like. The resulting process is again quite time consuming and inefficient.
Various types of prior art document management systems have been proposed, exemplified by U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,411,685; 6,859,909; 7,164,488; 7,317,697; 7,339,707, and U.S. application Ser. Nos. 09/922,745; 09/939,440; and 10/476,833; they have suffered from various drawbacks. In addition to being either cumbersome to use, tied to proprietary technology, or simply not appropriately designed to adequately streamline the electronic to paper to electronic signature process, none have adequately met user needs.
Although the Adobe Acrobat family of products, produced by Adobe Systems, Inc., San Jose Calif. have had some success with various proprietary solutions to manage PDF documents, these proprietary solutions tend to consume much computer system resources, and also tend to lack flexibility and are restricted to fillable or structured PDF documents
Thus the present unsatisfactory state of affairs of electronic to paper back to electronic conversions continues to be the standard method of conducting business. Further improvements in this area are thus desirable.